HONG KONG — Vanessa Rodel was so afraid to believe the news, she asked her lawyer to repeat it, five times.

But each time, the message she had longed to hear was exactly the same, and each time it was every bit as momentous: Rodel, a Filipino national, and her seven-year-old daughter Keana would finally be leaving Hong Kong for a new life thousands of kilometres away in Canada, ending a decade of suspended animation here…

…

The others who helped Snowden — a Sri Lankan couple with two young children and another single Sri Lankan man — are still awaiting word on whether Canada will accept them as refugees. And the long years as second-class citizens in Hong Kong — with the ever-present threat of being returned to the countries they fled in fear — seem to be having a dire impact.

Supun Kellapatha, father of the two children, was hospitalized Friday due to increasingly fragile mental health; only his last-ditch court challenge now stands in the way of his being forced back to Sri Lanka.

In 1933, the London Daily Mirror published a picture of a gravestone in a Jewish cemetery in Bucharest inscribed with some Hebrew characters and the name Adolf Hitler, but this Bucharest Hitler could not have been the Nazi leader’s grandfather. At the time, though, this picture sufficiently worried Hitler that he had the Nazi law defining Jewishness written to exclude Jesus Christ and himself.

… the refugee flood is, in its origins and its greatest extremes, a European phenomenon. We Westerners have been refugees much more than we have been refugee’d upon…

Today we face the Syrian crisis. It is neither the largest nor the most unmanageable refugee flood of the postwar era, but it has arrived at a bad moment: first, because we have by now forgotten our own history as refugees; second, because an ugly politics of intolerance is influencing many Western governments; and third, because there is an unfortunate public belief that refugee tides are larger and more permanent than they really are.